About Me

Recovering academic, blogger-back-from-the-dead, and one-year veteran of the workforce. Now an organizational embed, with lessons learned from the trenches and stories to tell. All with a not-so-slightly academic twist.

Monday, June 23, 2008

creepy

One of my favorite ways to procrastinate is to read through the archives of Amber's blog. It is full of humor, wisdom, and smart, sassy style. It is also full of bon mots, anecdotes, and tips that I like to mine to make a point in a discussion with TD, say about traveling together or why women wear makeup (I give up on ever wearing perfume again, and now the smell makes me sick, too).

We're shortly to have dinner with a couple, one half of whom is in town doing depositions while her other half is tagging along for the joyride of being in an awesome part of the country. At least it is here, and not in some blah part of the country where you don't know anyone. I wanted to look up the name of that food thing Amber described in one of her ventures out to the boondocks of Virginia when she was on deposition duty (note to self: "Awesome Blossom" is another chain's name) when one of the rubes recommended some chain restaurant. Before you haterz descend, I grew up eating in chain restaurants and still do eat at them whenever I'm hanging out with the family. I could have emailed her, but why pester a person with a "real job" when you can just do a site-specific search on their publicly available blog? Truly, we are children of the internets.

She has been blogging for four years. I have been blogging for two. At some point, especially given my verbosity, that means thousands and thousands of words. No ink has been spilled on my behalf, but I did get carpal tunnel for a while. But it's finally happened. Upon reading the comments to this post, I came across one that sounded familiar. The next thought would have been "that's like something I would write," until I scrolled down far enough to see that I had written it. I didn't even recognize my own words or content, and nothing about it seemed familiar, except that the style was somewhat plausible. Either I am going senile, or I have really written so many things that I am beginning to forget what I write. In any case, I totally creeped myself out. It is not unlike chancing upon your teenage diary, not recognizing it, laughing derisively, and then recoiling in horror upon the anagnorisis of self-recognition. Not that this comment was super bad, but it is a little hoity-toity, and I am super creeped out by the fact that I could not recognize my own writing. It's like not recognizing your own reflection. (shudder)

Occasionally, my memory is good enough to be able to do a site-specific search for something so that I can link to an old post on the same topic (my blog template is pre-Google/Blogger, so no tags). But now--really, did I write this? Did I write on this? What did I say? Holy moly I am so full of myself--this is more common. I hear about loyal fans and readers who say they have read every single post I have ever written. To you, I say thank you, and to you, I apologize for the extreme verbosity (and occasional snark) you have lived through, because I can't even imagine reading every single thing I've written, and most of these posts are hella long. Also, "dude."